DAR AL ISLAM - PAKISTAN/TURKEY: ATATURK'S TURKEY DISAPPEARING

A watershed in Islamic history
Victories for the rule of law and moderates in Pakistan and Turkey will marginalise the Islamists in the region, suggests
by Whit Mason

LAST weekend brought a double dose of that rare commodity, great news from the Muslim world.

First, in Pakistan, a resounding triumph for the rule of law; then in Turkey, a thundering victory for temperate, thoughtful democracy over fearmongering and jingoism.
On Saturday in Pakistan, the Supreme Court demonstrated true judicial independence virtually for the first time in the country's 60-year history when it reinstated Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, nemesis of Pakistan's "progressive" military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.

Then on Sunday, Turks delivered the biggest electoral triumph in 50 years to the Justice and Development Party, a political movement that demonstrates the possibility of transcending the apparent tension between being devoutly Muslim in private and progressive and democratic in politics.

These two events mark a watershed in the modern history of the Islamic world: both are principled popular rebellions against military elites whose will has traditionally gone unchallenged. The rebellions could hardly have been more promising or have occurred in more important places.

For Pakistan, a nuclear power of 170 million people bordering Afghanistan, Iran and India, the Supreme Court's decision capped months of demonstrations across the country - the first mass agitation to continue through the hot season, with temperatures often in the 40s - in the modern history of the subcontinent.

Many members of Pakistan's middle class supported Musharraf when in 1999 he first took power from the government of Nawaz Sharif, who was widely seen as corrupt. But the middle class has watched with increasing unease while the President concentrated more and more power in the army's hands even while cutting deals with militants. When Musharraf dismissed Chaudhry, these would-be yuppie Pakistanis thought "If he can do this to the Chief Justice, what protection can we hope for?"

Musharraf dismissed Chaudhry on charges of nepotism but the real reason was widely recognised as being the Chief Justice's declaration that Musharraf would be violating the Constitution if he were re-elected President by the parliament, which is stacked with his cronies. Chaudhry's reinstatement, therefore, prefigures a return to democratic rule, with elections contested by both exiled former prime ministers, Sharif and Benazir Bhutto.

The return to democracy promises to marginalise Islamists in two ways. First, Islamist parties won only 11 per cent of the vote in the elections in 2002 - despite a great deal of underhand support from Musharraf's regime.

Second, a democratically elected government, almost certainly led by Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, will enjoy much greater legitimacy in its enforcement of the law.

Whenever Musharraf has moved against militants, by contrast, he has been accused of acting as a lackey of the US.

On the other side of Iran, Turkey has long been vaunted as the sole democracy in the Islamic world and outsiders have often hopefully described it as a "bridge between East and West". But its democracy has been incomplete and it has lacked a bridge between the Westernised elite in Istanbul and Ankara and its own more traditional masses.

The country has been dominated by urban industrialists, a dogmatic judiciary and, most importantly, the military. Known as "white Turks", this class has long cast itself as the defenders of the Westernising, militantly secular legacy of the republic's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

They bitterly oppose the JDP on the grounds that many of its founders had belonged to a relatively moderate Islamist party that the army pushed from power a decade ago in what was known as a "post-modern coup".

A group of reformers within the discredited party, headed by former Istanbul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, agreed that the Islamists' long-time leader, Necmettin Erbakan, had lost the plot. The reformers created a new party, the JDP, whose ideological label was "conservative democrat" but whose real watchword would be pragmatism. Buttressed by a new class of entrepreneurs in Anatolia known as "Islamic Calvinists" (referring to the sober, hard-working capitalists heralded by Max Weber), the JDP won the 2002 elections to form the first single-party government in a generation.

The conservative Economist magazine, no apologist for Islamists, acknowledges that in its five years in power the JDP "has done more to transform and modernise Turkey than any of their secular predecessors except Ataturk and perhaps Turgut Ozal, a visionary prime minister in the 1980s". After the voters' ringing endorsement, it can be expected to go further still. Erdogan's Government has pushed through a raft of reforms that finally earned Turkey its long-sought candidacy to join the European Union. They included scrapping the death penalty, dethroning men from their traditional status as heads of household and doing away with reduced sentences for "honour killing". The economy, meanwhile, has roared along at an annual 7.3 per cent growth rate while foreigners have invested a record $20 billion.

The triumphant JDP bridges the class and cultural divide within Turkey, demonstrating to secular sceptics that a government led by devout Muslims can be pragmatic and constructive and to Muslims sceptical of democratic politics that their personal convictions and origins will not bar them from power.

The principled decision by Pakistan's Supreme Court demonstrates that there are non-Islamist Pakistanis with the strength and will to resist authoritarian rule.

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